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An unexpected victory: container stacking at the port of Los Angeles

421 points by catbird 5y ago

ISL 5y ago
Government can move extremely quickly when there is universal agreement. For precisely that reason, periods of universal agreement rarely last long.
lftl 5y ago
I suppose it's not fair, but I was disappointed after reading the title, hoping that the article would be an assessment on whether changing the container stacking rule has made a difference yet. There seems to be a fair amount of skepticism that the stacking rule was having a large negative impact, so I was excited to see an assessment of how/if it's made any difference.
- jeromegv 5y ago
  There are many problems. Many. So it’s unlikely one fix is going to solve a lot and make a huge dent. But those problems need to be fixed one after each other as they compound on each other.
- UncleOxidant 5y ago
  It (helped) to solve one of the problems. Others remain, but it's a good first step.
  - OldHand2018 5y ago
    Did it help? That's the question. We should have enough data to get preliminary results. I search Google news just about every day and all I can find is people patting themselves on the back for getting the rule changed, but nothing about whether the rule change has made a difference.
    - ncmncm 5y ago
      Here is betting we do not get any of the stories about how it failed to improve matters.
walkerbrown 5y ago
> There was a rule in the Port of Los Angeles saying you could only stack shipping containers two containers high. This is not correct. Next though, CA DOT should do a one time waiver and extension of the 90-day BIT inspections on trailer chassis.
beastman82 5y ago
This is one of the most incredible victories I've ever seen. Congratulations!
- ReptileMan 5y ago
  I still prefer Austerlitz and Cannae ...
ncmncm 5y ago
Two points: First, negative feedback is good. The problem here was a case of positive feedback, which are always bad. This Ryan person might be helping in the one crisis, but he has just installed a thousand new timebombs. Second, the reason NYT has nothing about this is that NYT editors tell its reporters to find stories that seem to illustrate what the editors want said. NYT is not really interested in what is actually happening; NYT has always been that way.
- unethical_ban 5y ago
  If you're suggesting the NYTimes acts differently than other newspapers of record (i.e. decent sources of news) I would be interested in more details.
  - ncmncm 5y ago
    I don't have authoritative information about how other newspapers work. (By the evidence, most just transcribe press releases and wire stories.) But I read an account by a longtime NYT reporter describing how the NYT news office works.
- ksdale 5y ago
  What new timebombs do you think he has installed, for example?
  - ncmncm 5y ago
    Did you read the tweets? He implies that it is a given that negative feedback is a problem, not a solution to problems.
    - ksdale 5y ago
      It seems like maybe he confused positive and negative feedback? But if you think he's created a situation where positive feedback is going to cause massive problems down the line, I was interested in knowing specifically what you had in mind.
aninteger 5y ago
Wow. There's just no straight talk anymore... Why does everyone have to dance around the issue. Just say the facts and this article could have been quite a bit shorter.
- datameta 5y ago
  Humans are not perfect, some of us get angry at the perception of being superceded by those less experienced. Some will dig in their heels and not fix the issue if it means admitting they were unable to see the problem and suggest a solution. So that's the beauty of how it was communicated. No blame was placed on anyone, plausible deniability was given out to everyone, and he pre-empted being derided as a layman who doesn't know shit by pretending to accidentally discover the issue. In one fell swoop so many egos were placated and a plan was laid out on top of all that. No back and forth, just all boxes checked and all given license to proceed forward with enthusiasm and intent.
cyberge99 5y ago
This is a regional problem. There are other ports in the US (East Coast, etc). I don’t see how it will be a global problem. Sure it will affect supply and demand significantly, but it’s not a global catastrophe.
- phicoh 5y ago
  Based on container port statistics (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_busiest_container_ports https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_busiest_container_port...) LA and Long Beach are not very big compared to Rotterdam and Antwerp. And Hamburg is roughly in the middle between LA and Long Beach in size. LA and Long Beach don't seem big enough to cause a global problem.
- robbrown451 5y ago
  You're suggesting the east coast ports for stuff shipped from China?
justinator 5y ago
OK so this is essentially a self-written news story that was manipulated to make it feel-good. That's bad. Also, now that I know I'm manipulated, I'm skeptical that the changes will have the outcome that they want. It could but it's not good that you've told me you've manipulated me. That's also bad.
- dqpb 5y ago
  What do you mean by self-written?
  - justinator 5y ago
    They're breaking a story that didn't actually happen - the article itself says that the boatride isn't the reason for the policy change, it just sounds nice and marketable. They also admitted that they got influential people ready to retweet the story - also a marketing move.
    - djrogers 5y ago
      The writer of the article is speculating when he says the boat ride was immaterial. He’s not the original author.
- otterley 5y ago
  If the solution proves effective, will you change your mind, or will you simply remain forever outraged that you didn't like how the story was told?
  - justinator 5y ago
    Well, we can talk about dropping atomic bombs on Japan during WWII if you want. The discussion isn't going to be a very simple one.
    - otterley 5y ago
      Wait, what? You want to compare the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians during wartime to a story about temporarily allowing containers to be stacked a little higher?
CalChris 5y ago
> A bureaucrat insisting that stacked containers are an eyesore No, that wasn't the case. It was a Fire Department ordinance for the city and not the port. It didn't apply to the Port of Long Beach itself. This is a photo from October 19th, before the emergency order on October 22. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2021/10/26/los-angeles-long-beach-ports-fine-firms-over-container-backlog/8549770002/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2021/10/26/los-an... Containers are stacked five high.
johnklos 5y ago
Simple fix: stand containers on their ends. You'd fit a heck of a lot more even if you don't stack two high.
- skybrian 5y ago
  What sort of equipment do you suppose is needed to do that?
  - bluGill 5y ago
    Containers are not made to be stacked on end like that and won't always support their own weight if stacked on end.
deleted 5y ago
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seymore_12 5y ago
Article is wrong. The rule for max 2 container height stacking was for areas *outside" of the port/terminal, i.e various container yards hinterland.
BitLit 5y ago
Apropos the importance of building new container shipping ports in places that don’t have land scarcity, traffic, and well organized NIMBYs? Let me introduce you to the port of Prince Rupert in northern British Columbia. The port of Prince Rupert has 5 (as in “can be counted on one hand”) berths and transfers 1.2M containers per year. The port of Long Beach has 80 (yes, eight-zero!!!) berths and only transfers 8.1M containers per year. Long Beach transfers 100k containers per berth per year. Prince Rupert transfers 240k containers per berth per year.
- vlovich123 5y ago
  I wonder if the containers per berth number goes down as the number of berths increases in one port because other bottlenecks appear. I suspect adding more ports is actually a way to maintain efficiency here, but there's probably logistical challenges with that (skilled workforce, supply chain support, road network & other infrastructure to handle the volume, etc). There's probably also far more cost to adding a port than adding a berth.
  - BitLit 5y ago
    Indeed. And Prince Rupert is probably an outlier since it has almost everything going for it in terms of ship-to-shore efficiency. With a population is ~12k, road traffic rounds to zero. This also shows that a large population isn’t required for a large port. But, more importantly Prince Rupert is well connected to the CN rail network. A rail connection is key for efficient intermodal shipping. And there aren’t many deep water harbours on the west coast with railways. Building rail or road connections to new ports wouldn’t be trivial.
- mig39 5y ago
  Prince Rupert is also physically closer to Asia (saves 2-3 days of sailing time), and has very little other sea traffic. The rail line is also expanding, and has very little non-port traffic. The port itself is protected by geography, and is one of the deepest natural harbours in the world. It's a neat place! Well, except for being one of the rainiest cities in Canada. Edit: If you're interested in this kind of thing, here's a drone video I shot last year, of Prince Rupert's container port: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9DyG9wOWi0c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9DyG9wOWi0c
1cvmask 5y ago
The bureaucratic rule of only stacking containers of two in storage areas seem absurd when in the rest of the world there examples of them being stacked 9 or even 12 high. Weird government rules should have sunset clauses, at least for man-made emergencies. Maybe they should travel and see how ports are managed in the rest of the world. This workflow rule that clogged the port seems to be the perfect platform for a former McKinsey consultant like Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg to shine. Yet that thunder is stolen by the WSJ coverage and Flexport CEO tweetstorm.
scythe 5y ago
>how about we create a new port? There are other ports. They're not economically viable. See e.g. my old comment about the history of Prince Rupert, BC: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28871284 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28871284
rossdavidh 5y ago
From near the end: "My going theory on why the news isn’t being shared is because it is being instinctively suppressed by the implicit forces that filter out such actions from the official narratives. The whole scenario might give people the idea that we could do things because they’re helpful. It gives status to someone for being helpful. It highlights our general failure to do helpful things, and plausibly blames all our supply chain (and also plausibly all our civilizational) problems on stupid pointless rules and a failure to do obviously correct things. That’s not a good look for power, and doesn’t help anyone’s narratives, so every step of the way such things get silenced." No, I think the news isn't being shared because it doesn't stoke fear, greed, or anger. The economics of the news causes people in those industries to (consciously or subconsciously) prioritize headlines which stoke fear, greed, or anger. "We solved a problem" doesn't stoke any of that.
TedShiller 5y ago
This is not a victory. In the area where I live containers constantly fall into the ocean because shipping companies stack them too high. The only thing this achieves is even more garbage in the ocean.
contingencies 5y ago
So in short, NIMBY zoning rules caused the port to suffocate on its own containers, even though it is merely a stone's throw from working oil pumps and LAX.
zitterbewegung 5y ago
Just because they changed behavior doesn’t mean it will work.
- LurkingPenguin 5y ago
  Incidentally, there was another post on HN earlier written by a truck driver and he believes it's more complicated. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29022124 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29022124
- dustintrex 5y ago
  This. As the old saw says, for every complex problem there is a solution that is simple, obvious, and wrong. I mean, it's not a bad thing they fixed the rule, but either way it's unlikely to cause or prevent the collapse of the US economy. My money is on the ports themselves being the problem. Having people waiting around for hours if not days is incredibly inefficient, and the Rotterdams, Singapores and Shenzhens of the world do not have this issue.
  - zitterbewegung 5y ago
    I agree with you but not only the ports it’s going to be the last mile of the supply chain. Let’s assume they unload every ship in a week or two all of those trucks have to push the stuff to the right place. Maybe some of them had to layoff and or furlough truckers. Those truckers then get better jobs . So you still fail. Also I think the deadline is gonna be Christmas .
sleibrock 5y ago
In Factorio design this is simply increasing the buffer size. If the truck-loadings-per-hour don't increase then it's not going to matter how large you make the buffer. Adding a secondary site for putting containers also seems like it's going to be a new challenge for the logistics company scheduling the rides (I have a friend who deals with train cargo scheduling). Truckers who are used to showing up at the port are now going to have to go to a completely different site altogether, and who knows how many IO issues the new site will also bring in. Now's the chance for logistics companies to start hiring OpenTTD players.
- notwedtm 5y ago
  You have idle trucks unable to increase the truck-loadings-per-hour because they can't complete a single job due to the lack of storage space for their empty containers. Providing that storage space will allow the trucks to complete their circuit.
  - tuatoru 5y ago
    The increased wait time also degrades capacity permanently. There was an essay by a truck driver posted here yesterday[1]. MMy understanding: many truck drivers are owner-operators, operating on extremely slim margins at the best of times (say 5 pickups per day). With long waits and maybe one or two pickups per day, they go out of business. 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29022124 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29022124
- parsimo2010 5y ago
  There were supposedly trucks that couldn’t be loaded because they had no place to get rid of the empty container they currently had. So truck loading rate was low, not because of the speed of the workers and cranes, but because of the availability of the trucks. So this is supposed to allow the truck loading rate to go up by making it easier for trucks to become available. I don’t know if that will happen, but this is an increased buffer size that is directly addressing a limiting factor. It might help.
  - 5y ago
JoeAltmaier 5y ago
Some talk about 'building a new port' as part of the solution. I'm thinking that's a decade project and $100B or some such? PoLA tried to expand for a decade and the impact statements got bogged down and nothing happened if I remember right (my sister-in-law was doing the math on the statements)
- darkarmani 5y ago
  I think talking about the price of a new port, reveals how important it is to use the existing ones efficiently.
- thrower123 5y ago
  I'd like to think that if we declared a state of emergency, suspended all regulations and deployed a couple battalions of Seabees we could still build a port in a matter of months, rather than years. I'd like to think we still have those kinds of capabilities if they were needed, but I'm increasingly not sure that we actually do.
  - JoeAltmaier 5y ago
    The cement alone would take years to pour. The giant cranes have to have rail to unload onto, and it has to go somewhere. The computers to control it could take years to program. The harbor dredging and shore upgrades could take years. And its not all in parallel. Maybe an off-shore port? With a floating causeway of rail? To do something quickly requires some out-of-the-box thinking.
  - WJW 5y ago
    Depends on what you consider a "port" to be. Sure, a shoddy good-enough-for-wartime place where ships can dock can be built in a few months. Building a decent container port with proper container cranes, train yards and the software to integrate it all in a couple of months? That capability has never existed.
  - _jal 5y ago
    If you can develop the political will to treat the citizens of LA like we did the Iraqis in the second Gulf adventure, sure. Just suspend the rule of law and send in Bechtel behind a bunch of guns.
bhy 5y ago
From what I heard, the real issue is the ships are not bringing these containers back, because: 1. there's not so much good for US to export (volume-wise); 2. shipping price is so high that to save time, ships do not wait to load empty containers. As long as US has a net import of containers, whatever buffer created will be filled up soon.
- MauranKilom 5y ago
  I was also thinking about this after reading the original thread. If the port is full and the trucks are full, clearly we have more overall containers than before. Where did they come from? And is the place they come from now short on containers? Those are of course separate problems. If we are accumulating empty containers, you could just dump them somewhere for the time being. Yes, the trucks would have to drive somewhere else than the port to dump them, but that's clearly better than economic standstill. And if it turns out that China is short on empty containers, then we might need to work on the incentives for ships to bring back the empties. But unless this whole clogging was caused by a very temporary spike in container throughput, increasing buffer capacity will only alleviate the problem for so long.
- slobiwan 5y ago
  That's the popular consensus here in LA, it's cheaper to discard the containers than to ship them back empty (and nobody at the receiving end wants enough of what we have to make it worth sending them back full). However I drive through the port area frequently and always see containers stacked well above the 2-high limit. I suppose that means they are not empty containers? There definitely has to be some alternate use for these empty containers. People have tried to build houses with them, but I think one issue preventing widescale implementation of that use is that quite a few of them were originally holding some kind of material that would be hostile to human inhabitants. And living in a metal box in the Southern California summer would not be feasible without expensive air conditioning retrofits.
  - bcrosby95 5y ago
    The limit of 2 was for off-port sites, within cities themselves. The article is wrong on that point.
conductr 5y ago
I followed this and from my understanding the changes while enacted quickly are still only temporary (rollback in 120 days). If that's the case, I'd like "them" to think about how this situation could have been avoided all together. I can't help but thinking about how all the Asian markets were having similar log jams due to economies reopening and the Suez issue months ago. Surely it was known (or, could have been known) that that log jam was tsunami wave heading to LA? I'm not sure if stacking 5-6 high is a long term solution. It works now, because it's only at 2 high and the buffer is available. But if they were at 5-6 high under normal circumstances when this tsunami wave hit we'd be talking about letting them go 8-9 high? Maybe limit them to 2 high but allow them to file a temporary permit to go to X high with justification... something along those lines, so it is a rather accessible flex up and down and it doesn't require extreme levels of non-local politics to accomplish.
- ciphol 5y ago
  What exactly is the problem with 8-9 high, or 20 high, or whatever the technical limit is? The land belongs to the port owners, why should anyone else be able to restrict how they stack containers?
  - djrogers 5y ago
    > The land belongs to the port owners, A) the article is wrong, the limit was at truck yards, not the port B) Zoning is a thing, and as long as it is, residents (read voters) will want it used to keep their homes pretty and valuable whenever possible.
  - conductr 5y ago
    1. LB residents don't want that, and limit of 2 has worked until now. Height restrictions are nearly universal in the US and this is not a California/Long Beach specific problem. Sure you can argue there the balance is too lopsided and limit of 2 is too restrictive for industry. I tend to believe a port town is an industrial town. If you live there, you should expect to see the industrial side. I grew up in Houston and would never live near the port/oil refinery areas because of that eyesore (completely subjective personal opinion). Unless maybe my profession was tied to it, at which point it probably doesn't bother me. 2. What if it was stacked up to LIMIT and a wave of containers come again? The point is to reserve a buffer. I'm rather agnostic on the numbers use variables if you like; Normal limit X, buffer size Y, X+Y is what you can get a temporary permit for, Z is technical limit and this math is a test X+Y <= Z
mrandish 5y ago
This was a great story to read, especially after enduring over a year where so many small problems scaled into largely avoidable huge harms due to well-intentioned (but poorly thought through) rules being followed or created.
deleted 5y ago
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mbauman 5y ago
All the dismissals here are fascinating to me — and sure seem to be exactly the overarching story of TFA. Yes, this certainly isn't the only problem here, but it's certainly the easiest to fix. And yes, the narrative of the story is definitely important, because it avoided all the rabble you see here that was getting in the way of a simple first step.
- munificent 5y ago
  We are so used to doom and negativity in the news that we discard any positive news outright... which creates a self-reinforcing feedback loop that everything is terrible all the time.
  - pessimizer 5y ago
    Declaring great success at the moment a course of action of decided on is going to be more productive for generalized cynicism than stories of bad things that have actually happened. Pretend this were reported as "Long Beach allows containers to be stacked higher in order to deal with a glut of empty containers" rather than Randian Superhero Casually Solves Port Problem, and Miraculously the Parasitic Bureaucrats Are Forced to Listen to Him by the People of Twitter, and By the Way, Why Can't We Demolish Neighborhoods and Replace Them With SROs? Wouldn't more cynicism be engendered by the second story than the first if the change turns out to be ineffective or even destructive?
- mcguire 5y ago
  The problem isn't fixed. If the actual problem isn't fixed soon, the extra capacity will be used in some finite and probably short time.
Alex3917 5y ago
Great post. I more or less assumed this is what had happened, but great to see it written up. On one hand, the fact that you need to go through this kind of song and dance to get anything done is probably yet another good indicator that America is deep into an irreversible decline. One the other hand, it's great to see this kind of well-document contemporaneous analysis of what good change making actually entails right now, something that's not only interesting and useful currently, and will surely be of interest to folks long into the future. Like maybe being right was never enough to get things done at any point in history, but the amount of hoops you currently need to jump through in addition to being right seems deeply pathological.
irrational 5y ago
I’ve seen this kind of thing happen at companies. There is a serious problem that all the lower level people know about, but nobody says anything to the higher ups because nobody wants to be seen as a troublemaker and potentially lose their job. Everyone assumes that eventually it will become so bad that the higher ups will notice. That rarely happens in my experience. Instead things become bad and the solution is layoffs, reorgs, etc. In the midst of the chaos we can often make the change that precipitated the whole crisis without anyone becoming wiser. Rinse and repeat.
- bombcar 5y ago
  This is where big money consultants make their money. They come in and tell everyone what they already knew in a way that lets everyone pretend is was magically discovered.
  - s1artibartfast 5y ago
    To be fair, many big money consultants are very clear about this. Often times the goal is to simply provide information to senior management that middle management isn't giving them.
- Invictus0 5y ago
  See this recent article on the thermocline of truth: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27977056 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27977056
zelienople 5y ago
Or, and this is radical, we could just stop buying cheap Chinese-made crap like inflatable Halloween decorations made from petroleum products and shipped across the sea using bunker oil. Or, we could pass strong right-to-repair legislation and mandate 3-5 year warranties on electronics so that my 55-inch Samsung curved LED TV can be fixed when it dies at 2 years and one month old. Or, even more radical, we could stop squeezing out consumer babies and training them in our wasteful ways. But no, let's keep feeding the bloated consumers of America. Let the planet burn!
- dang 5y ago
  Please don't post in the flamewar style to HN. It's not what this site is for. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- fabianfabian 5y ago
  Hey take a look around in your room and find out where half of the things are made, and then reflect on who these consumers are you are talking about.
  - SSLy 5y ago
    Most of items in my room are clothes, made in EU (at least that's what the labels say).
- eli_gottlieb 5y ago
  Yes, I actually prefer consumer capitalism over a deliberate eugenic extermination of "consoomers".
- C19is20 5y ago
  Buyers remorse?
ChuckMcM 5y ago
Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding is that the 'stacking rule' meant that people with more empties than they could stack 2 high on their property were "storing" empties on trailer chassis that carry one container. As I understood it, by letting them stack empties higher, it freed up trailers to be used by trucks to go get containers out of the port. When that happens the port then wants empties to put back on the ship (or full if they are going somewhere) and then the ship can continue on. So the "win" here was that more trailers would be available to take full containers from ships and that would move things along.
- ajmurmann 5y ago
  From Ryan Peterson's description, it was more that there was no space left to unload full containers from ships or empties from trucks to then pick up a full one from the ship. In essence container grid lock.
  - dcow 5y ago
    Yep. Both the rx and tx buffers were full and the port was dropping packets. (There were both container ships waiting to offload and trucks waiting to offload full and empty containers, respectively.) Now that buffer size has been increased, there is more bandwidth to available to actually move containers. Since the spike is temporary, the problem has gone away. If we were permanently faced with more containers then, yes, we'd need another port.
    - LeanderK 5y ago
      wow, i was a bit confused after reading the article but your buffer analogy immediately made sense!
    - btown 5y ago
      By this analogy, the politician literally "downloaded more RAM!"
      - 5y ago
gouggoug 5y ago
> A bureaucrat insisting that stacked containers are an eyesore, causing freight to pile up because trucks are stuck sitting on empty containers, thus causing a cascading failure that destroys supply lines and brings down the economy. That certainly sounds like something that was in an early draft of Atlas Shrugged but got crossed out as too preposterous for anyone to take seriously. This is a little disingenuous. From what I understand, this was a rule put in place a long time ago, in a different context. The ramifications of such rule under unprecedented stress weren't understood or foreseen. Infinitely stacked containers would probably be an eyesore to be honest. Great they removed the rule, but don't forget about Chesterton's fence.
- YokoZar 5y ago
  Chesterton's fence is satisfied here: it asks us to know why a rule was put into place so that we know we aren't missing something when we change it. In this case we do know the reason why: aesthetics. The side effects are just greater now, so out the rule goes.
  - rsj_hn 5y ago
    yeah, stacking boxes X levels high is not some deep thing that requires philosophers to gather 'round and debate Chesterton's fence for too long.
  - mcguire 5y ago
    What is the evidence that the reason is aesthetics? Other posters have claimed that it is a fire department ordinance.
    - tuatoru 5y ago
      What would the consequences of an earthquake be?
  - SilasX 5y ago
    I think the broader (meta-?)point of Chesterton's fence is that our beliefs about the reason for the fence can still be wrong because we lost the tacit knowledge that produced and kept the fence there. So even if the rule shows up in some "city aesthetic code" where they wrote down "yep more than two is ugly", it may very well be satisfying some other desideratum that no one wrote down. That's not to say this rule really does have other reasons, but you can't stop at "yup that's what our records show". And indeed, some of them mentioned possible safety issues that arise with greater depths.
revel 5y ago
This article is ridiculous. "It's so easy but nobody expected it to happen!" Most of freight is run off spreadsheets and over the phone or by email. Flexport is built around digitization and optimization. Half of the appeal of their product is that it gives customers improved visibility! It's therefore not surprising that a local city mayor didn't realize he had the power to unclog the US traffic jam. Referring to him diminutively as a bureaucrat is unfair. This guy almost certainly didn't even realize he could do anything to fix the problem and the fact that he resolved it in 8 hours (!) is something to be celebrated, not chided.
- more_corn 5y ago
  It is quite reasonable to make fun of people who required a 2 container limit for aesthetic reasons which accidentally caused a major kink in the global supply chain. It was also inarguably effective to publicly shame them into reversing their decision.
  - gorbachev 5y ago
    Do you think the current mayor had anything to do with enacting the regulation to limit the stacking height?
  - p1mrx 5y ago
    If the limit had always been 6 instead of 2, wouldn't we have (1) smaller truck yards, and (2) the same problem with no easy solution?
    - revel 5y ago
      You can go to any port town in the US and you will see containers stacked up like tiny towns. The equipment to move the containers is usually the bottleneck not the yard space.
      - deleted 5y ago
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miniatureape 5y ago
What will people be watching to see the effect? Is there any data published that would show an increase in freight behind moved because of this change?
krisoft 5y ago
> There was a rule in the Port of Los Angeles saying you could only stack shipping containers two containers high. This is incorrect. There was a zoning rule which affected truck yards in Long Beach and Los Angeles. Truck yards. Not the port itself. As stated in the linked tweets actually. But if you don't believe that you can just google an image of the Port of Los Angeles from let's say 2019 and count how high the container piles go. Here is a randomly selected image from 2019 where 5 high piles can be clearly counted: https://www.joc.com/sites/default/files/field_feature_image/Port%20of%20Los%20Angeles%20trucks%20Jan.%202019%20FIT.jpg https://www.joc.com/sites/default/files/field_feature_image/... Accuracy is important. I'm not an expert on logistics, or zoning laws. But how could I trust the article's author when they clearly unable to parse their own sources? > Normally one would settle this by changing prices, but for various reasons we won’t get into price mechanisms aren’t working properly to fix supply shortages. It's nice that the article is not going into that. Instead it hammers on that politicians regulate where and how many containers can you plop down. That is not the real issue. If you are moving containers into an area, and you are not moving an equal amount out then you are going to run out of space to store the containers. It is that simple. You can tweak rules to make a bit more space, for example by stacking them higher in the truck yards. But the real question is: why are the people who own these containers incentivised to move them back to where they want them to be filled? If you solve that the problem solves itself. If you can't solve that piles of containers will fill up what little more space you won by tweaking. So the very point the article decides to "not go into" is the only one worth going into.
- daveslash 5y ago
  I agree with everything you said. Anecdote: I was driving into San Pedro in 2019, and I didn't have a smart phone at the time (so no map/gps). I took the wrong exit off of the 710 and ended up on Terminal Island. That was the most visually overwhelming place I have ever been... the scale of the ships, the height of the stacked containers (more than 2), the abundance of trains... the cranes... visually, overwhelming. And then there was all the road work, construction, detours, one-ways down wrong-way streets.... I was a hell of a morning as I tried to get to my presentation....
- jlkuester7 5y ago
inetknght 5y ago
> * 14. Everyone in the port, or at least a lot of them, knew this was happening.* > 15. None of those people managed to do anything about the rule, or even get word out about the rule. No reporters wrote up news reports. No one was calling for a fix. The supply chain problems kept getting worse and mostly everyone agreed not to talk about it much and hope it would go away. It's been my experience that nearly all of the times it's the low-, and maybe mid-, -level workers who see problems. And it's usually the upper end of the business or bureaucracy who end up ignoring the problem. And then it's also been my experience that after the problem gets ignored for a while, the people who see the problem also don't report later problems because they know it won't be fixed and they're not empowered to fix it themselves. This is a widespread problem in my eyes.
- Invictus0 5y ago
  There was an article about this phenomenon recently--the author called it the "thermocline of truth". https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27977056 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27977056
  - dragonwriter 5y ago
    > There was an article about this phenomenon recently--the author called it the "thermocline of truth". The author was using terminology introduced quite a while ago by Bruce F. Webster: https://brucefwebster.com/2008/04/15/the-wetware-crisis-the-themocline-of-truth/ https://brucefwebster.com/2008/04/15/the-wetware-crisis-the-...
- bluGill 5y ago
  While you are not wrong, it isn't 100% true either. The problem has long been recognized in various forms and solutions have been developed. I did a factory tour a few years back for a local major manufacture (I work for them but I won't say who...), and there were signs all over "stop the line: you have the power!" to remind workers when they see something wrong they have the power to stop everything until it is fixed. It doesn't happen often, but more than once a worker has seen a part that looked "off" stopped the line and had a full investigation done. Sometimes it was determined things were okay, but other times the wrong alloy was used if the part had gone to a customer it would have been an early failure. Of course the above is only able to fix local issues. It doesn't really leave any way for someone to say "we will have a bottleneck here if something else goes wrong"...
zz865 5y ago
It seems weird that there is no incentive to put empty containers on an empty boat to China, esp when there is a shortage of containers in China. Maybe the port should charge higher rent for storing empty containers? There is something missing in the story.
- Factorium 5y ago
  Its currently taking too long to load those containers back. Its cheaper to just dock, unload, sail off. Short-term optimisation.
  - zz865 5y ago
    Its cheaper only because container storage isn't priced correctly. If the containers were charged at $HIGH_RENT/day storage fee the owners would pay someone to get rid of them.
phkahler 5y ago
This seems like a disaster waiting to happen. Something is causing a surplus of empty containers, and allowing them to expand storage for them isn't going to change the underlying problem. So if the new rule to allow them 6-high is temporary, the owners will stack them 6-high and then run out of room again. But next time the (temporary) rule change will revert to 2-high and they'll all be in violation. If they get the proposed government land to "dump" them "temporarily" that will simply become a huge pile of empty containers. It sounds like anyone with a fancy use for empty shipping containers can probably get them for "free" right now if you just show up with a truck to haul them away.
dang 5y ago
Ongoing related thread: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29029825 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29029825 The previous stack: Long Beach has temporarily suspended container stacking limitations - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28971226 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28971226 - Oct 2021 (483 comments) Flexport CEO on how to fix the US supply chain crisis - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28957379 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28957379 - Oct 2021 (265 comments)
Nelkins 5y ago
But did it actually help? It's not clear to me that suspending the rule had the intended effect.
Seattle3503 5y ago
I just finished listening to the freaknomics podcast about negativity in the media. Maybe this story didn't gain traction because it doesn't fit the "If it bleeds, it leads" model.
silexia 5y ago
I think we can summarize that the solution is to remove things that prevent the free market from functioning properly. Here are some additional ideas: -Unions are good for representing workers in negotiations with private companies. Taxpayers do not have anyone to represent them in negotiations with public unions. Disallow unions in government jobs. Government already has enough corruption and inefficiency. -Dismantle the patent system. Ideas are worthless, execution is everything. -Abolish the limited liability company. We saw in the mortgage crisis that allowing private companies to profit by putting risk on the public shoulders leads to disaster. -Publish all tax records and make a constitutional amendment that all prices paid must be public. The free market makes the basic assumption that all prices paid and offered are public information.
codazoda 5y ago
This article suggests that the twitter thread about the boat ride was just a story that could be told. If so, it's harmless, but I'm left wondering, is it true?
Diesel555 5y ago
This is a lesson on policy and rhetoric. As a programmer I always assumed people thought like me. But they don't. Studying policy mid-career is one of the most eye opening things I have done. Like it or not, if you want to advance policy you have to set up an organized plan that evokes some emotion. This is opposed to applying only logic which would motivate me if I were the audience. Apply to reason alone and you will lose. > Then our hero enters, and decides to coordinate and plan a persuasion campaign to get the rule changed. Here’s how I think this went down.

421 points by catbird 5y ago

ISL 5y ago

Government can move extremely quickly when there is universal agreement. For precisely that reason, periods of universal agreement rarely last long.

lftl 5y ago

I suppose it's not fair, but I was disappointed after reading the title, hoping that the article would be an assessment on whether changing the container stacking rule has made a difference yet. There seems to be a fair amount of skepticism that the stacking rule was having a large negative impact, so I was excited to see an assessment of how/if it's made any difference.

jeromegv 5y ago
There are many problems. Many. So it’s unlikely one fix is going to solve a lot and make a huge dent. But those problems need to be fixed one after each other as they compound on each other.
UncleOxidant 5y ago
It (helped) to solve one of the problems. Others remain, but it's a good first step.
- OldHand2018 5y ago
  Did it help? That's the question. We should have enough data to get preliminary results. I search Google news just about every day and all I can find is people patting themselves on the back for getting the rule changed, but nothing about whether the rule change has made a difference.
  - ncmncm 5y ago
    Here is betting we do not get any of the stories about how it failed to improve matters.

walkerbrown 5y ago

> There was a rule in the Port of Los Angeles saying you could only stack shipping containers two containers high. This is not correct. Next though, CA DOT should do a one time waiver and extension of the 90-day BIT inspections on trailer chassis.

beastman82 5y ago

This is one of the most incredible victories I've ever seen. Congratulations!

ReptileMan 5y ago
I still prefer Austerlitz and Cannae ...

ncmncm 5y ago

Two points: First, negative feedback is good. The problem here was a case of positive feedback, which are always bad. This Ryan person might be helping in the one crisis, but he has just installed a thousand new timebombs. Second, the reason NYT has nothing about this is that NYT editors tell its reporters to find stories that seem to illustrate what the editors want said. NYT is not really interested in what is actually happening; NYT has always been that way.

unethical_ban 5y ago
If you're suggesting the NYTimes acts differently than other newspapers of record (i.e. decent sources of news) I would be interested in more details.
- ncmncm 5y ago
  I don't have authoritative information about how other newspapers work. (By the evidence, most just transcribe press releases and wire stories.) But I read an account by a longtime NYT reporter describing how the NYT news office works.
ksdale 5y ago
What new timebombs do you think he has installed, for example?
- ncmncm 5y ago
  Did you read the tweets? He implies that it is a given that negative feedback is a problem, not a solution to problems.
  - ksdale 5y ago
    It seems like maybe he confused positive and negative feedback? But if you think he's created a situation where positive feedback is going to cause massive problems down the line, I was interested in knowing specifically what you had in mind.

aninteger 5y ago

Wow. There's just no straight talk anymore... Why does everyone have to dance around the issue. Just say the facts and this article could have been quite a bit shorter.

datameta 5y ago
Humans are not perfect, some of us get angry at the perception of being superceded by those less experienced. Some will dig in their heels and not fix the issue if it means admitting they were unable to see the problem and suggest a solution. So that's the beauty of how it was communicated. No blame was placed on anyone, plausible deniability was given out to everyone, and he pre-empted being derided as a layman who doesn't know shit by pretending to accidentally discover the issue. In one fell swoop so many egos were placated and a plan was laid out on top of all that. No back and forth, just all boxes checked and all given license to proceed forward with enthusiasm and intent.

cyberge99 5y ago

This is a regional problem. There are other ports in the US (East Coast, etc). I don’t see how it will be a global problem. Sure it will affect supply and demand significantly, but it’s not a global catastrophe.

phicoh 5y ago
Based on container port statistics (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_busiest_container_ports https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_busiest_container_port...) LA and Long Beach are not very big compared to Rotterdam and Antwerp. And Hamburg is roughly in the middle between LA and Long Beach in size. LA and Long Beach don't seem big enough to cause a global problem.
robbrown451 5y ago
You're suggesting the east coast ports for stuff shipped from China?

justinator 5y ago

OK so this is essentially a self-written news story that was manipulated to make it feel-good. That's bad. Also, now that I know I'm manipulated, I'm skeptical that the changes will have the outcome that they want. It could but it's not good that you've told me you've manipulated me. That's also bad.

dqpb 5y ago
What do you mean by self-written?
- justinator 5y ago
  They're breaking a story that didn't actually happen - the article itself says that the boatride isn't the reason for the policy change, it just sounds nice and marketable. They also admitted that they got influential people ready to retweet the story - also a marketing move.
  - djrogers 5y ago
    The writer of the article is speculating when he says the boat ride was immaterial. He’s not the original author.
otterley 5y ago
If the solution proves effective, will you change your mind, or will you simply remain forever outraged that you didn't like how the story was told?
- justinator 5y ago
  Well, we can talk about dropping atomic bombs on Japan during WWII if you want. The discussion isn't going to be a very simple one.
  - otterley 5y ago
    Wait, what? You want to compare the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians during wartime to a story about temporarily allowing containers to be stacked a little higher?

CalChris 5y ago

> A bureaucrat insisting that stacked containers are an eyesore No, that wasn't the case. It was a Fire Department ordinance for the city and not the port. It didn't apply to the Port of Long Beach itself. This is a photo from October 19th, before the emergency order on October 22. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2021/10/26/los-angeles-long-beach-ports-fine-firms-over-container-backlog/8549770002/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2021/10/26/los-an... Containers are stacked five high.

johnklos 5y ago

Simple fix: stand containers on their ends. You'd fit a heck of a lot more even if you don't stack two high.

skybrian 5y ago
What sort of equipment do you suppose is needed to do that?
- bluGill 5y ago
  Containers are not made to be stacked on end like that and won't always support their own weight if stacked on end.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

seymore_12 5y ago

Article is wrong. The rule for max 2 container height stacking was for areas *outside" of the port/terminal, i.e various container yards hinterland.

BitLit 5y ago

Apropos the importance of building new container shipping ports in places that don’t have land scarcity, traffic, and well organized NIMBYs? Let me introduce you to the port of Prince Rupert in northern British Columbia. The port of Prince Rupert has 5 (as in “can be counted on one hand”) berths and transfers 1.2M containers per year. The port of Long Beach has 80 (yes, eight-zero!!!) berths and only transfers 8.1M containers per year. Long Beach transfers 100k containers per berth per year. Prince Rupert transfers 240k containers per berth per year.

vlovich123 5y ago
I wonder if the containers per berth number goes down as the number of berths increases in one port because other bottlenecks appear. I suspect adding more ports is actually a way to maintain efficiency here, but there's probably logistical challenges with that (skilled workforce, supply chain support, road network & other infrastructure to handle the volume, etc). There's probably also far more cost to adding a port than adding a berth.
- BitLit 5y ago
  Indeed. And Prince Rupert is probably an outlier since it has almost everything going for it in terms of ship-to-shore efficiency. With a population is ~12k, road traffic rounds to zero. This also shows that a large population isn’t required for a large port. But, more importantly Prince Rupert is well connected to the CN rail network. A rail connection is key for efficient intermodal shipping. And there aren’t many deep water harbours on the west coast with railways. Building rail or road connections to new ports wouldn’t be trivial.
mig39 5y ago
Prince Rupert is also physically closer to Asia (saves 2-3 days of sailing time), and has very little other sea traffic. The rail line is also expanding, and has very little non-port traffic. The port itself is protected by geography, and is one of the deepest natural harbours in the world. It's a neat place! Well, except for being one of the rainiest cities in Canada. Edit: If you're interested in this kind of thing, here's a drone video I shot last year, of Prince Rupert's container port: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9DyG9wOWi0c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9DyG9wOWi0c

1cvmask 5y ago

The bureaucratic rule of only stacking containers of two in storage areas seem absurd when in the rest of the world there examples of them being stacked 9 or even 12 high. Weird government rules should have sunset clauses, at least for man-made emergencies. Maybe they should travel and see how ports are managed in the rest of the world. This workflow rule that clogged the port seems to be the perfect platform for a former McKinsey consultant like Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg to shine. Yet that thunder is stolen by the WSJ coverage and Flexport CEO tweetstorm.

scythe 5y ago

>how about we create a new port? There are other ports. They're not economically viable. See e.g. my old comment about the history of Prince Rupert, BC: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28871284 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28871284

rossdavidh 5y ago

From near the end: "My going theory on why the news isn’t being shared is because it is being instinctively suppressed by the implicit forces that filter out such actions from the official narratives. The whole scenario might give people the idea that we could do things because they’re helpful. It gives status to someone for being helpful. It highlights our general failure to do helpful things, and plausibly blames all our supply chain (and also plausibly all our civilizational) problems on stupid pointless rules and a failure to do obviously correct things. That’s not a good look for power, and doesn’t help anyone’s narratives, so every step of the way such things get silenced." No, I think the news isn't being shared because it doesn't stoke fear, greed, or anger. The economics of the news causes people in those industries to (consciously or subconsciously) prioritize headlines which stoke fear, greed, or anger. "We solved a problem" doesn't stoke any of that.

TedShiller 5y ago

This is not a victory. In the area where I live containers constantly fall into the ocean because shipping companies stack them too high. The only thing this achieves is even more garbage in the ocean.

contingencies 5y ago

So in short, NIMBY zoning rules caused the port to suffocate on its own containers, even though it is merely a stone's throw from working oil pumps and LAX.

zitterbewegung 5y ago

Just because they changed behavior doesn’t mean it will work.

LurkingPenguin 5y ago
Incidentally, there was another post on HN earlier written by a truck driver and he believes it's more complicated. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29022124 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29022124
dustintrex 5y ago
This. As the old saw says, for every complex problem there is a solution that is simple, obvious, and wrong. I mean, it's not a bad thing they fixed the rule, but either way it's unlikely to cause or prevent the collapse of the US economy. My money is on the ports themselves being the problem. Having people waiting around for hours if not days is incredibly inefficient, and the Rotterdams, Singapores and Shenzhens of the world do not have this issue.
- zitterbewegung 5y ago
  I agree with you but not only the ports it’s going to be the last mile of the supply chain. Let’s assume they unload every ship in a week or two all of those trucks have to push the stuff to the right place. Maybe some of them had to layoff and or furlough truckers. Those truckers then get better jobs . So you still fail. Also I think the deadline is gonna be Christmas .

sleibrock 5y ago

In Factorio design this is simply increasing the buffer size. If the truck-loadings-per-hour don't increase then it's not going to matter how large you make the buffer. Adding a secondary site for putting containers also seems like it's going to be a new challenge for the logistics company scheduling the rides (I have a friend who deals with train cargo scheduling). Truckers who are used to showing up at the port are now going to have to go to a completely different site altogether, and who knows how many IO issues the new site will also bring in. Now's the chance for logistics companies to start hiring OpenTTD players.

notwedtm 5y ago
You have idle trucks unable to increase the truck-loadings-per-hour because they can't complete a single job due to the lack of storage space for their empty containers. Providing that storage space will allow the trucks to complete their circuit.
- tuatoru 5y ago
  The increased wait time also degrades capacity permanently. There was an essay by a truck driver posted here yesterday[1]. MMy understanding: many truck drivers are owner-operators, operating on extremely slim margins at the best of times (say 5 pickups per day). With long waits and maybe one or two pickups per day, they go out of business. 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29022124 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29022124
parsimo2010 5y ago
There were supposedly trucks that couldn’t be loaded because they had no place to get rid of the empty container they currently had. So truck loading rate was low, not because of the speed of the workers and cranes, but because of the availability of the trucks. So this is supposed to allow the truck loading rate to go up by making it easier for trucks to become available. I don’t know if that will happen, but this is an increased buffer size that is directly addressing a limiting factor. It might help.
- 5y ago

JoeAltmaier 5y ago

Some talk about 'building a new port' as part of the solution. I'm thinking that's a decade project and $100B or some such? PoLA tried to expand for a decade and the impact statements got bogged down and nothing happened if I remember right (my sister-in-law was doing the math on the statements)

darkarmani 5y ago
I think talking about the price of a new port, reveals how important it is to use the existing ones efficiently.
thrower123 5y ago
I'd like to think that if we declared a state of emergency, suspended all regulations and deployed a couple battalions of Seabees we could still build a port in a matter of months, rather than years. I'd like to think we still have those kinds of capabilities if they were needed, but I'm increasingly not sure that we actually do.
- JoeAltmaier 5y ago
  The cement alone would take years to pour. The giant cranes have to have rail to unload onto, and it has to go somewhere. The computers to control it could take years to program. The harbor dredging and shore upgrades could take years. And its not all in parallel. Maybe an off-shore port? With a floating causeway of rail? To do something quickly requires some out-of-the-box thinking.
- WJW 5y ago
  Depends on what you consider a "port" to be. Sure, a shoddy good-enough-for-wartime place where ships can dock can be built in a few months. Building a decent container port with proper container cranes, train yards and the software to integrate it all in a couple of months? That capability has never existed.
- _jal 5y ago
  If you can develop the political will to treat the citizens of LA like we did the Iraqis in the second Gulf adventure, sure. Just suspend the rule of law and send in Bechtel behind a bunch of guns.

bhy 5y ago

From what I heard, the real issue is the ships are not bringing these containers back, because: 1. there's not so much good for US to export (volume-wise); 2. shipping price is so high that to save time, ships do not wait to load empty containers. As long as US has a net import of containers, whatever buffer created will be filled up soon.

MauranKilom 5y ago
I was also thinking about this after reading the original thread. If the port is full and the trucks are full, clearly we have more overall containers than before. Where did they come from? And is the place they come from now short on containers? Those are of course separate problems. If we are accumulating empty containers, you could just dump them somewhere for the time being. Yes, the trucks would have to drive somewhere else than the port to dump them, but that's clearly better than economic standstill. And if it turns out that China is short on empty containers, then we might need to work on the incentives for ships to bring back the empties. But unless this whole clogging was caused by a very temporary spike in container throughput, increasing buffer capacity will only alleviate the problem for so long.
slobiwan 5y ago
That's the popular consensus here in LA, it's cheaper to discard the containers than to ship them back empty (and nobody at the receiving end wants enough of what we have to make it worth sending them back full). However I drive through the port area frequently and always see containers stacked well above the 2-high limit. I suppose that means they are not empty containers? There definitely has to be some alternate use for these empty containers. People have tried to build houses with them, but I think one issue preventing widescale implementation of that use is that quite a few of them were originally holding some kind of material that would be hostile to human inhabitants. And living in a metal box in the Southern California summer would not be feasible without expensive air conditioning retrofits.
- bcrosby95 5y ago
  The limit of 2 was for off-port sites, within cities themselves. The article is wrong on that point.

conductr 5y ago

I followed this and from my understanding the changes while enacted quickly are still only temporary (rollback in 120 days). If that's the case, I'd like "them" to think about how this situation could have been avoided all together. I can't help but thinking about how all the Asian markets were having similar log jams due to economies reopening and the Suez issue months ago. Surely it was known (or, could have been known) that that log jam was tsunami wave heading to LA? I'm not sure if stacking 5-6 high is a long term solution. It works now, because it's only at 2 high and the buffer is available. But if they were at 5-6 high under normal circumstances when this tsunami wave hit we'd be talking about letting them go 8-9 high? Maybe limit them to 2 high but allow them to file a temporary permit to go to X high with justification... something along those lines, so it is a rather accessible flex up and down and it doesn't require extreme levels of non-local politics to accomplish.

ciphol 5y ago
What exactly is the problem with 8-9 high, or 20 high, or whatever the technical limit is? The land belongs to the port owners, why should anyone else be able to restrict how they stack containers?
- djrogers 5y ago
  > The land belongs to the port owners, A) the article is wrong, the limit was at truck yards, not the port B) Zoning is a thing, and as long as it is, residents (read voters) will want it used to keep their homes pretty and valuable whenever possible.
- conductr 5y ago
  1. LB residents don't want that, and limit of 2 has worked until now. Height restrictions are nearly universal in the US and this is not a California/Long Beach specific problem. Sure you can argue there the balance is too lopsided and limit of 2 is too restrictive for industry. I tend to believe a port town is an industrial town. If you live there, you should expect to see the industrial side. I grew up in Houston and would never live near the port/oil refinery areas because of that eyesore (completely subjective personal opinion). Unless maybe my profession was tied to it, at which point it probably doesn't bother me. 2. What if it was stacked up to LIMIT and a wave of containers come again? The point is to reserve a buffer. I'm rather agnostic on the numbers use variables if you like; Normal limit X, buffer size Y, X+Y is what you can get a temporary permit for, Z is technical limit and this math is a test X+Y <= Z

mrandish 5y ago

This was a great story to read, especially after enduring over a year where so many small problems scaled into largely avoidable huge harms due to well-intentioned (but poorly thought through) rules being followed or created.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

mbauman 5y ago

All the dismissals here are fascinating to me — and sure seem to be exactly the overarching story of TFA. Yes, this certainly isn't the only problem here, but it's certainly the easiest to fix. And yes, the narrative of the story is definitely important, because it avoided all the rabble you see here that was getting in the way of a simple first step.

munificent 5y ago
We are so used to doom and negativity in the news that we discard any positive news outright... which creates a self-reinforcing feedback loop that everything is terrible all the time.
- pessimizer 5y ago
  Declaring great success at the moment a course of action of decided on is going to be more productive for generalized cynicism than stories of bad things that have actually happened. Pretend this were reported as "Long Beach allows containers to be stacked higher in order to deal with a glut of empty containers" rather than Randian Superhero Casually Solves Port Problem, and Miraculously the Parasitic Bureaucrats Are Forced to Listen to Him by the People of Twitter, and By the Way, Why Can't We Demolish Neighborhoods and Replace Them With SROs? Wouldn't more cynicism be engendered by the second story than the first if the change turns out to be ineffective or even destructive?
mcguire 5y ago
The problem isn't fixed. If the actual problem isn't fixed soon, the extra capacity will be used in some finite and probably short time.

Alex3917 5y ago

Great post. I more or less assumed this is what had happened, but great to see it written up. On one hand, the fact that you need to go through this kind of song and dance to get anything done is probably yet another good indicator that America is deep into an irreversible decline. One the other hand, it's great to see this kind of well-document contemporaneous analysis of what good change making actually entails right now, something that's not only interesting and useful currently, and will surely be of interest to folks long into the future. Like maybe being right was never enough to get things done at any point in history, but the amount of hoops you currently need to jump through in addition to being right seems deeply pathological.

irrational 5y ago

I’ve seen this kind of thing happen at companies. There is a serious problem that all the lower level people know about, but nobody says anything to the higher ups because nobody wants to be seen as a troublemaker and potentially lose their job. Everyone assumes that eventually it will become so bad that the higher ups will notice. That rarely happens in my experience. Instead things become bad and the solution is layoffs, reorgs, etc. In the midst of the chaos we can often make the change that precipitated the whole crisis without anyone becoming wiser. Rinse and repeat.

bombcar 5y ago
This is where big money consultants make their money. They come in and tell everyone what they already knew in a way that lets everyone pretend is was magically discovered.
- s1artibartfast 5y ago
  To be fair, many big money consultants are very clear about this. Often times the goal is to simply provide information to senior management that middle management isn't giving them.
Invictus0 5y ago
See this recent article on the thermocline of truth: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27977056 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27977056

zelienople 5y ago

Or, and this is radical, we could just stop buying cheap Chinese-made crap like inflatable Halloween decorations made from petroleum products and shipped across the sea using bunker oil. Or, we could pass strong right-to-repair legislation and mandate 3-5 year warranties on electronics so that my 55-inch Samsung curved LED TV can be fixed when it dies at 2 years and one month old. Or, even more radical, we could stop squeezing out consumer babies and training them in our wasteful ways. But no, let's keep feeding the bloated consumers of America. Let the planet burn!

dang 5y ago
Please don't post in the flamewar style to HN. It's not what this site is for. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
fabianfabian 5y ago
Hey take a look around in your room and find out where half of the things are made, and then reflect on who these consumers are you are talking about.
- SSLy 5y ago
  Most of items in my room are clothes, made in EU (at least that's what the labels say).
eli_gottlieb 5y ago
Yes, I actually prefer consumer capitalism over a deliberate eugenic extermination of "consoomers".
C19is20 5y ago
Buyers remorse?

ChuckMcM 5y ago

Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding is that the 'stacking rule' meant that people with more empties than they could stack 2 high on their property were "storing" empties on trailer chassis that carry one container. As I understood it, by letting them stack empties higher, it freed up trailers to be used by trucks to go get containers out of the port. When that happens the port then wants empties to put back on the ship (or full if they are going somewhere) and then the ship can continue on. So the "win" here was that more trailers would be available to take full containers from ships and that would move things along.

ajmurmann 5y ago
From Ryan Peterson's description, it was more that there was no space left to unload full containers from ships or empties from trucks to then pick up a full one from the ship. In essence container grid lock.
- dcow 5y ago
  Yep. Both the rx and tx buffers were full and the port was dropping packets. (There were both container ships waiting to offload and trucks waiting to offload full and empty containers, respectively.) Now that buffer size has been increased, there is more bandwidth to available to actually move containers. Since the spike is temporary, the problem has gone away. If we were permanently faced with more containers then, yes, we'd need another port.
  - LeanderK 5y ago
    wow, i was a bit confused after reading the article but your buffer analogy immediately made sense!
  - btown 5y ago
    By this analogy, the politician literally "downloaded more RAM!"
    - 5y ago

gouggoug 5y ago

> A bureaucrat insisting that stacked containers are an eyesore, causing freight to pile up because trucks are stuck sitting on empty containers, thus causing a cascading failure that destroys supply lines and brings down the economy. That certainly sounds like something that was in an early draft of Atlas Shrugged but got crossed out as too preposterous for anyone to take seriously. This is a little disingenuous. From what I understand, this was a rule put in place a long time ago, in a different context. The ramifications of such rule under unprecedented stress weren't understood or foreseen. Infinitely stacked containers would probably be an eyesore to be honest. Great they removed the rule, but don't forget about Chesterton's fence.

YokoZar 5y ago
Chesterton's fence is satisfied here: it asks us to know why a rule was put into place so that we know we aren't missing something when we change it. In this case we do know the reason why: aesthetics. The side effects are just greater now, so out the rule goes.
- rsj_hn 5y ago
  yeah, stacking boxes X levels high is not some deep thing that requires philosophers to gather 'round and debate Chesterton's fence for too long.
- mcguire 5y ago
  What is the evidence that the reason is aesthetics? Other posters have claimed that it is a fire department ordinance.
  - tuatoru 5y ago
    What would the consequences of an earthquake be?
- SilasX 5y ago
  I think the broader (meta-?)point of Chesterton's fence is that our beliefs about the reason for the fence can still be wrong because we lost the tacit knowledge that produced and kept the fence there. So even if the rule shows up in some "city aesthetic code" where they wrote down "yep more than two is ugly", it may very well be satisfying some other desideratum that no one wrote down. That's not to say this rule really does have other reasons, but you can't stop at "yup that's what our records show". And indeed, some of them mentioned possible safety issues that arise with greater depths.

revel 5y ago

This article is ridiculous. "It's so easy but nobody expected it to happen!" Most of freight is run off spreadsheets and over the phone or by email. Flexport is built around digitization and optimization. Half of the appeal of their product is that it gives customers improved visibility! It's therefore not surprising that a local city mayor didn't realize he had the power to unclog the US traffic jam. Referring to him diminutively as a bureaucrat is unfair. This guy almost certainly didn't even realize he could do anything to fix the problem and the fact that he resolved it in 8 hours (!) is something to be celebrated, not chided.

more_corn 5y ago
It is quite reasonable to make fun of people who required a 2 container limit for aesthetic reasons which accidentally caused a major kink in the global supply chain. It was also inarguably effective to publicly shame them into reversing their decision.
- gorbachev 5y ago
  Do you think the current mayor had anything to do with enacting the regulation to limit the stacking height?
- p1mrx 5y ago
  If the limit had always been 6 instead of 2, wouldn't we have (1) smaller truck yards, and (2) the same problem with no easy solution?
  - revel 5y ago
    You can go to any port town in the US and you will see containers stacked up like tiny towns. The equipment to move the containers is usually the bottleneck not the yard space.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
- 5y ago

miniatureape 5y ago

What will people be watching to see the effect? Is there any data published that would show an increase in freight behind moved because of this change?

krisoft 5y ago

> There was a rule in the Port of Los Angeles saying you could only stack shipping containers two containers high. This is incorrect. There was a zoning rule which affected truck yards in Long Beach and Los Angeles. Truck yards. Not the port itself. As stated in the linked tweets actually. But if you don't believe that you can just google an image of the Port of Los Angeles from let's say 2019 and count how high the container piles go. Here is a randomly selected image from 2019 where 5 high piles can be clearly counted: https://www.joc.com/sites/default/files/field_feature_image/Port%20of%20Los%20Angeles%20trucks%20Jan.%202019%20FIT.jpg https://www.joc.com/sites/default/files/field_feature_image/... Accuracy is important. I'm not an expert on logistics, or zoning laws. But how could I trust the article's author when they clearly unable to parse their own sources? > Normally one would settle this by changing prices, but for various reasons we won’t get into price mechanisms aren’t working properly to fix supply shortages. It's nice that the article is not going into that. Instead it hammers on that politicians regulate where and how many containers can you plop down. That is not the real issue. If you are moving containers into an area, and you are not moving an equal amount out then you are going to run out of space to store the containers. It is that simple. You can tweak rules to make a bit more space, for example by stacking them higher in the truck yards. But the real question is: why are the people who own these containers incentivised to move them back to where they want them to be filled? If you solve that the problem solves itself. If you can't solve that piles of containers will fill up what little more space you won by tweaking. So the very point the article decides to "not go into" is the only one worth going into.

daveslash 5y ago
I agree with everything you said. Anecdote: I was driving into San Pedro in 2019, and I didn't have a smart phone at the time (so no map/gps). I took the wrong exit off of the 710 and ended up on Terminal Island. That was the most visually overwhelming place I have ever been... the scale of the ships, the height of the stacked containers (more than 2), the abundance of trains... the cranes... visually, overwhelming. And then there was all the road work, construction, detours, one-ways down wrong-way streets.... I was a hell of a morning as I tried to get to my presentation....
jlkuester7 5y ago

inetknght 5y ago

> * 14. Everyone in the port, or at least a lot of them, knew this was happening.* > 15. None of those people managed to do anything about the rule, or even get word out about the rule. No reporters wrote up news reports. No one was calling for a fix. The supply chain problems kept getting worse and mostly everyone agreed not to talk about it much and hope it would go away. It's been my experience that nearly all of the times it's the low-, and maybe mid-, -level workers who see problems. And it's usually the upper end of the business or bureaucracy who end up ignoring the problem. And then it's also been my experience that after the problem gets ignored for a while, the people who see the problem also don't report later problems because they know it won't be fixed and they're not empowered to fix it themselves. This is a widespread problem in my eyes.

Invictus0 5y ago
There was an article about this phenomenon recently--the author called it the "thermocline of truth". https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27977056 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27977056
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > There was an article about this phenomenon recently--the author called it the "thermocline of truth". The author was using terminology introduced quite a while ago by Bruce F. Webster: https://brucefwebster.com/2008/04/15/the-wetware-crisis-the-themocline-of-truth/ https://brucefwebster.com/2008/04/15/the-wetware-crisis-the-...
bluGill 5y ago
While you are not wrong, it isn't 100% true either. The problem has long been recognized in various forms and solutions have been developed. I did a factory tour a few years back for a local major manufacture (I work for them but I won't say who...), and there were signs all over "stop the line: you have the power!" to remind workers when they see something wrong they have the power to stop everything until it is fixed. It doesn't happen often, but more than once a worker has seen a part that looked "off" stopped the line and had a full investigation done. Sometimes it was determined things were okay, but other times the wrong alloy was used if the part had gone to a customer it would have been an early failure. Of course the above is only able to fix local issues. It doesn't really leave any way for someone to say "we will have a bottleneck here if something else goes wrong"...

zz865 5y ago

It seems weird that there is no incentive to put empty containers on an empty boat to China, esp when there is a shortage of containers in China. Maybe the port should charge higher rent for storing empty containers? There is something missing in the story.

Factorium 5y ago
Its currently taking too long to load those containers back. Its cheaper to just dock, unload, sail off. Short-term optimisation.
- zz865 5y ago
  Its cheaper only because container storage isn't priced correctly. If the containers were charged at $HIGH_RENT/day storage fee the owners would pay someone to get rid of them.

phkahler 5y ago

This seems like a disaster waiting to happen. Something is causing a surplus of empty containers, and allowing them to expand storage for them isn't going to change the underlying problem. So if the new rule to allow them 6-high is temporary, the owners will stack them 6-high and then run out of room again. But next time the (temporary) rule change will revert to 2-high and they'll all be in violation. If they get the proposed government land to "dump" them "temporarily" that will simply become a huge pile of empty containers. It sounds like anyone with a fancy use for empty shipping containers can probably get them for "free" right now if you just show up with a truck to haul them away.

dang 5y ago

Ongoing related thread: What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29029825 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29029825 The previous stack: Long Beach has temporarily suspended container stacking limitations - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28971226 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28971226 - Oct 2021 (483 comments) Flexport CEO on how to fix the US supply chain crisis - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28957379 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28957379 - Oct 2021 (265 comments)

Nelkins 5y ago

But did it actually help? It's not clear to me that suspending the rule had the intended effect.

Seattle3503 5y ago

I just finished listening to the freaknomics podcast about negativity in the media. Maybe this story didn't gain traction because it doesn't fit the "If it bleeds, it leads" model.

silexia 5y ago

I think we can summarize that the solution is to remove things that prevent the free market from functioning properly. Here are some additional ideas: -Unions are good for representing workers in negotiations with private companies. Taxpayers do not have anyone to represent them in negotiations with public unions. Disallow unions in government jobs. Government already has enough corruption and inefficiency. -Dismantle the patent system. Ideas are worthless, execution is everything. -Abolish the limited liability company. We saw in the mortgage crisis that allowing private companies to profit by putting risk on the public shoulders leads to disaster. -Publish all tax records and make a constitutional amendment that all prices paid must be public. The free market makes the basic assumption that all prices paid and offered are public information.

codazoda 5y ago

This article suggests that the twitter thread about the boat ride was just a story that could be told. If so, it's harmless, but I'm left wondering, is it true?

Diesel555 5y ago

This is a lesson on policy and rhetoric. As a programmer I always assumed people thought like me. But they don't. Studying policy mid-career is one of the most eye opening things I have done. Like it or not, if you want to advance policy you have to set up an organized plan that evokes some emotion. This is opposed to applying only logic which would motivate me if I were the audience. Apply to reason alone and you will lose. > Then our hero enters, and decides to coordinate and plan a persuasion campaign to get the rule changed. Here’s how I think this went down.